Intel will release yet another generation of 14nm CPUs this year; 10nm CPUs to follow later

Intel has long held sway in the PC market. Rival AMD has tried, a times valiantly, to keep up, but other than a short spurt in popularity with the Athlon 64 line, Intel’s maintained its commanding lead.

Since the launch of its ‘Core i’ series of processors, particularly the second generation Core i series, Intel’s lead has only been growing. This lead can in part be attributed to Intel’s tick-tock development cycle.

This cycle involves a tick, which changes the chip design, and a tock, which shrinks the manufacturing process. These ticks and tocks alternate each year. The process shrink refers to the size of the transistor gates. As a rule of thumb, the smaller they are, the faster and more efficient they run, resulting in ever-increasing performance. A shrink in transistor size also means that a higher density of them can be packed into a given area.

Intel’s manufacturing process has shrunk from 32nm in 2011 to 14 nm today. The next step is 10nm, and this was expected last year.

For the last few years, Intel appears to have hit a roadblock. The shrink to the 10nm process is taking longer than expected and even forced Intel to abandon its tick-tock cycle for something that it’s calling PAO (Process Architecture Optimisation).

To put it another way, Intel has so far released three chips on the 14nm process – Broadwell (14 nm), Skylake (14 nm) and Kaby Lake (14 nm+), which caught the tech industry off-guard. Kaby Lake should have been built on the 10nm process.

Now, it appears that Intel will release yet another generation of chips on the 14nm process.

Called Coffee Lake (14 nm++), this will be Intel’s eight generation Core i series chip. There’s nothing to be consternated about, however. As PCWorld explains, this new 14 nm process, called 14 nm++ internally, is very different from the first 14 nm Broadwell chips.

As ArsTechnica points out, Kaby Lake offers 10-15 percent more performance than Skylake, partly due to higher clock speeds, for the same TDP. The upcoming Coffee Lake chips will offer up to 15 percent more performance over Kaby Lake, says Intel.  Either way, that’s a big bump in performance.

To add to this, 10nm chips are actually coming and they’ll form the Canon Lake lineup.

Analysts think that Intel plans to ship Coffee Lake chips for more mainstream applications and that the 10 nm Canon Lake chips will first hit low power devices like Ultrabooks before making their way to the mainstream. This will help Intel iron out any kinks in the 10 nm process.

AMD is finally throwing a spanner in Intel’s works as well. AMD’s Ryzen expected to pose quite a threat to Intel’s stranglehold on the high-end PC market. Will Intel’s 15 percent performance bump be competitive? We’ll know for sure by April this year.

The fight for CPU supremacy is indeed shaping up to be an interesting one.